Like the PC market, 2022 ends two years of strong growth for tablets and Chromebooks. In the fourth quarter, tablets posted stable growth of 0.3% with 45.7 million units shipped according to preliminary data from IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. But they fell by 3.3% over the whole year with a total of 162.8 million units.
The market is driven by the two leaders, Samsung and above all Apple, which with the successful launch of its new iPads saw its market share peak at 49.2% in the fourth quarter. Over the year as a whole, the Apple brand is the only one to show growth of 7%, even though Samsung lost -0.8% and Lenovo suffered the worst fall with -34.6%.
Initially focused on leisure uses, tablets are adapting to the expectations of the professional world. New players like Xiaomi and Oppo are also appearing and innovating by playing the connectivity card between the different terminals. “In this changing environment, it will be necessary for vendors to redesign their product portfolios to meet the needs of consumers, education and businesses in an effort to drive demand”underlines Anuroopa Nataraj, analyst at IDC.
On the side of Chromebooks, the contraction is still in place in the fourth quarter with shipments down 24.3% to 3.6 million units. The drop is 48% over the whole year but following a year of 3-digit growth: 180.5% in 2021!
The good news for analyst Jitesh Ubrani is that “The excess channel inventory that had been building up is starting to shrink and might potentially lead to more normalized growth in the coming quarters”. However, the economic slowdown will complicate the situation in segments other than education.
Acer, Dell, Lenovo and HP dominate the market in 2022 with relatively tight market shares of 22%, 21.3%, 19.5% and 18.4% respectively. Asus follows them by far with 6.8%. All manufacturers show a double-digit decline, starting with HP (-65.6%) and Lenovo (-54.4%).
